It takes a lot of courage and independent thinking to critique the system that your family and society have followed for several generations. And to shoot the arrow of critique at the bull’s eye, it also needs deep study.
One such non-conformist was the father of Indian Renaissance, Raja Ram Mohan Roy.
Roy was born on 22 May 1772 in a Brahmin family in West Bengal. From a very young age, he shunned orthodox Hindu rituals and idol worship. While expressing his thoughts in support of monotheism, he had a rift with his father, Ramkanto Roy, and left home at an early age to travel in the Himalayas and Tibet.
Here are five things about Roy that make him a brilliant critique of his times:
Roy left his home at a very young age to travel in the Himalayas and Tibet, and to read about various scriptures, religions and cultures. His mother tongue was Bengali, and he learned Sanskrit in school. He studied in a Madrasa in Patna, where he mastered Persian and Arabic. In the years to come, Roy would even excel Hebrew, Latin and Greek. He learned English only at the age of 22 years.
His intellectual curiosity reflects in the fact that he read the works of Euclid and Aristotle, as also the Quran, the Vedas, the Upanishads as well as Islamic scriptures. His mastery in Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit and Hindi helped him understand the original scriptures, as opposed to the translations.
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Roy’s strong viewpoints of monotheism evolved from these studies.
As was the practice in those times, Raja Ram Mohan Roy was a victim of child marriage. He was first married off at the age of nine, but his wife died soon after. His second marriage was at the age of 10 years, where which he had two sons–Radhaprasad and Ramaprasad. His second wife died in 1824, while his third wife, Uma Devi, outlived him.
In the times of Ram Mohan Roy, the practice of child marriage was the norm. The greater burden of these marriages had to be carried by girls, who would be impregnated at a very young, innocent age.
Although a victim of this social evil himself, Roy strongly advocated against child marriage in his later years. He had always been vocal about his criticism against such social evils that many people followed blindly. Child marriage was just one of the norms that he believed needed eradication.
His work with the British government taught him one more thing–that the superstitions followed by Hindus were not respected by the outside world. He thus wanted to modernise Hindu reforms to cope up with the times, proving that “superstitious practices which deform the Hindu religion have nothing to do with the pure spirit of its dictates!”
Sati, as you might know, was yet another social evil practised in those times. Widows were forced to sit on the burning pyre of along with the bodies of their dead husbands. The mere description of this practice sends chills down one’s spine.
In 1830, he travelled to the United Kingdom to ensure that the Bengal Sati Regulation law, passed by Lord William Bentinck in 1829 was not overturned.
In all of the reforms that Roy has been instrumental in bringing about, the abolishment of Sati is arguably one of the most prominent.
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It also included advocacy of the freedom of the press, the induction of Indians into high ranks of service, as well as a separation of the executive and judiciary.
He started the Atmiya Sabha Association that became a model for his Brahmo Samaj–the monotheistic-reformist movement of the Hindu religion. The association published an English weekly newspaper–the Bengal Gazette as well as a Persian newspaper called Mirat-Ul-Akhbar (Mirror of News).
